By SUZANNE DOWNING
Sept. 27, 2026 – Alaska’s top-four jungle primary has changed the look of the November ballot, and this analysis shows how vote splitting, confusion, and voters refusing to rank is likely leading to a Democrat takeover of Alaska.
This year could be the tipping point, with Democrats setting up to have a numeric majority in the Alaska House and Senate, and a clear path to the US Senate seat and Alaska governor’s office.
In the races on this year’s general-election ballot, there are 61 candidates listed as Republicans and 37 as Democrats. In the comparable races in 2020, before Alaska adopted its current system, the counts were 43 Republicans and 31 Democrats.
Excluding the race governor, which was not on the ballot in 2020, it’s 58 Republicans in 2026 versus 43 in 2020: 15 more, or a phenomenal 34.9% increase.
In reality, there are fewer Republicans because Decoy Dan J. Sullivan and Ruby Jones (House District 23) are two decoy candidates who registered as Republicans in order to drain votes from incumbent Republicans and allow the Democrat to win. It’s a form of trickery that is accommodated by the jungle primary, where the party members don’t get to choose their one candidate to proceed to the general election.
The difference is especially visible at the top of the ballot.
Three Republicans advanced in the governor’s race, and three Republicans advanced in the US Senate race (this includes Decoy Dan). Under the normal party-primary system, each party sent one nominee forward.
Under today’s system, candidates of every affiliation appear in the same primary, and the four highest vote-getters advance regardless of party. General-election voters then rank candidates in order of preference, or don’t rank and simply “bullet vote.”
Alaska first used the jungle primary and ranked-choice general election in 2022. We’re the only state to use such a combination, which has been made the state the target of mockery across the nation.
Wall Street Journal: Ranked-choice voting has made Alaska a national laughingstock
Here is the ballot comparison, counting candidates by their listed Republican or Democratic affiliation and excluding independents and minor parties, while allowing Decoy Dan and Ruby Jones to be counted as Republicans, but Independent Bill Hill in the US House race to be counted as the Democrat he is (Alaska Democratic Party endorsed):
| Office | 2020 Republicans | 2020 Democrats | 2026 Republicans | 2026 Democrats |
| Governor | — | — | 3 | 1 |
| US Senate | 1 | 0 | 3 | 1 |
| US House | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 (incl. Bill Hill) |
| State Senate seats on ballot | 10 | 5 | 14 | 7 |
| State House | 31 | 26 | 40 | 27 |
| Total | 43 | 31 | 61 | 38 |
The governor’s race was not on the 2020 ballot, so the 18-candidate Republican increase is not an apples-to-apples measure of growth in the Republican field. Excluding governor, the comparison is 43 Republicans in 2020 and 58 this year.
There is another wrinkle worth noting in the Democratic column. Alaska’s two prominent Democratic-backed federal challengers in 2020, Al Gross for Senate against Dan S. Sullivan, and Alyse Galvin for House against Don Young, ran under nonpartisan or independent labels after advancing through the Democratic-side primary. They, like Bill Hill, Decoy Dan, and Ruby Jones, were backed by the Democrats.
The old primary generally narrowed each major party to one contender before November. The top-four primary now leaves several Republicans competing in the same general-election race because Alaska is a Republican-leaning state that will tend to have more Republican candidates.
The 2022 election was the first to use the new system. That year, Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy won outright with a majority of first-choice votes, so additional ranked-choice rounds were unnecessary in his race.
But in the US House race, Democrat Mary Peltola defeated a field that included Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich after votes were transferred and many ballots were “exhausted,” or had no ranking.
Republican Lisa Murkowski, with a lot of support from Democrats, won the US Senate race in November, 2022, against fellow Republican Kelly Tshibaka; Democrats ran Pat Chesbro only as a placeholder candidate, while actually backing Murkowski. Buzz Kelley (Republican) was the fourth name on the November ballot. Thus, it was three Republicans but Murkowski winning with Democrat votes. When Chesbro was eliminated, she had about 29,078 first-choice votes, presumably all Democrats. 20,543 of those votes. transferred to Murkowski.
Now that party members don’t get to whittle down their candidates, that nearly 35% increase of Republicans on the November ballot translates into more split votes and exhausted ballots, which favors the Democrat candidate.
The other growing trend is the rise of the independents who are actually backed by the Democrats. Counting candidates listed as independent, nonpartisan or undeclared, while excluding minor parties, the supplied ballot comparison shows 28 this year versus 24 in 2020. Most of that increase is in the state House, where the count rose from 15 to 24.
That’s a 60% increase, and has shaped the ability of Democrats to take over the House with a coalition government.
In the high-profile federal races, the pattern has shifted: Gross and Galvin were the fake independent labels in 2020, while this year Bill Hill is the independent candidate in the US House field, but he is endorsed and funded by Democrats. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has added him to its Red to Blue program for candidates it is working to elect.
The sharpest change since 2020 is what November voters are being asked to sort out. Party primaries once did much of the narrowing.
Now Alaskans can see three Republicans in a statewide race, a Democrat felon in prison in New York (Eric Hafner) and a Democratic-endorsed independent in the same congressional field, and more independents in state House contests.
Ranked-choice voting is doing what it is designed to do in Alaska — split the Republican vote and put Democrats in charge of the state at every level, from US Senate to state House.
Democrats understood the assignment on ranked choice. Republicans are still arguing over the slogan
Democrats’ lawyer sends cease-and-desist threat to Alaska radio stations over ranked-choice voting repeal ads
